She was nothing if not Catholic, if not Ecclesiastical; but I don’t in the least mean that she was particularly devout. She observed all requisite forms, of course: went, as occasion demanded, to mass, to vespers, to confession; but religious fervour was the last thing she suggested, the last thing she affected. I never heard her talk of Faith or Salvation, of Sin or Grace, nor indeed of any matters spiritual. She was quite frankly a woman of the world, and it was the Church as a worldly institution, the Church corporal, the Papacy, Papal politics, that absorbed her interests. The loss of the Temporal Power was the wrong that filled the universe for her, its restoration the cause for which she lived. That it was a forlorn cause she would never for an instant even hypothetically admit. “Remember Avignon, remember the Seventy Years,” she used to say, with a nod that seemed to attribute apodictic value to the injunction.
“Mark my words, she’ll live to be Pope yet,” a ribald young man murmured behind her chair. “Oh, you tell me she is a woman. I’ll assume it for the sake of the argument—I’d do anything for the sake of an argument. But remember Joan, remember Pope Joan!” And he mimicked his Aunt Elizabeth’s inflection and her conclusive nod.
I had not been in Rome since that universe-filling wrong was perpetrated—not since I was a child of six or seven—when, a youth approaching twenty, I went there in the autumn of 1879; and I recollected Aunt Elizabeth only vaguely, as a lady with a face like a chapel, in whose presence—I had almost written in whose precincts—it had required some courage to breathe. But my mother’s last words, when I left her in Paris, had been, “Now mind you call on your Aunt Elizabeth at once. You mustn’t let a day pass. I am writing to her to tell her that you are coming. She will expect you to call at once.” So, on the morrow of my arrival, I made an exceedingly careful toilet (I remember to this day the pains I bestowed upon my tie, the revisions to which I submitted it!), and, with an anxious heart, presented myself at the huge brown Roman palace, a portion of which my formidable relative inhabited; a palace with grated windows, and a vaulted, crypt-like porte-cochère, and a tremendous Swiss concierge, in knee-breeches and a cocked hat: the Palazzo Zacchinelli.
The Swiss, flourishing his staff of office, marshalled me (I can’t use a less imposing word for the ceremony) slowly, solemnly, across a courtyard, and up a great stone staircase, at the top of which he handed me on to a functionary in black—a functionary with an ominously austere countenance, like an usher to the Inquisition. Poor old Archimede! Later, when I had come to know him well and tip him, I found he was the mildest creature, the amiablest, the most obliging, and that tenebrious mien of his only a congenital accident, like a lisp or a club-foot. But for the present he dismayed me, and I surrendered myself with humility and meekness to his guardianship. He conducted me through a series of vast chambers—you know those enormous, ungenial Roman rooms, their sombre tapestried walls, their formal furniture, their cheerless, perpetual twilight—and out upon a terrace.
The terrace lay in full sunshine. There was a garden below it, a garden with orange-trees, and rosebushes, and camellias, with stretches of greensward, with shrubberies, with a great fountain plashing in the midst of it, and broken, moss-grown statues: a Roman garden, from which a hundred sweet airs came up, in the gentle Roman weather. The balustrade of the terrace was set at intervals with flowering plants, in big urn-shaped vases; I don’t remember what the flowers were, but they were pink, and many of their petals had fallen, and lay scattered on the grey terrace pavement. At the far end, under an awning brave with red and yellow stripes, two ladies were seated—a lady in black, presumably the object of my pious pilgrimage; and a lady in white, whom, even from a distance, I discovered to be young and pretty. A little round table stood between them, with a carafe of water and some tumblers glistening crisply on it. The lady in black was fanning herself with a black lace fan. The lady in white held a book in her hand, from which I think she had been reading aloud. A tiny imp of a red Pomeranian dog had started forward, and was barking furiously.
This scene must have made a deeper impression upon my perceptions than any that I was conscious of at the moment, because it has always remained as fresh in my memory as you see it now. It has always been a picture that I could turn to when I would, and find unfaded: the garden, the blue sky, the warm September sunshine, the long terrace, and the two ladies seated at the end of it, looking towards me, an elderly lady in black, and a young lady in white, with dark hair.
My aunt quieted Sandro (that was the dog’s name), and giving me her hand, said “How do you do?” rather drily. And then, for what seemed a terribly long time, though no doubt it was only a few seconds, she kept me standing before her, while she scrutinised me through a double eye-glass, which she held by a mother-of-pearl handle; and I was acutely aware of the awkward figure I must be cutting to the vision of that strange young lady.
At last, “I should never have recognised you. As a child you were the image of your father. Now you resemble your mother,” Aunt Elizabeth declared; and lowering her glass, she added, “This is your cousin Rosalys.”
I wondered, as I made my bow, why I had never heard before that I had such a pretty cousin, with such a pretty name. She smiled on me very kindly, and I noticed how bright her eyes were, and how white and delicate her face. The little blue veins showed through the skin, and there was no more than just the palest, palest thought of colour in her cheeks. But her lips—exquisitely curved, sensitive lips—were warm red. She smiled on me very kindly, and I daresay my heart responded with an instant palpitation. She was a girl, and she was pretty; and her name was Rosalys; and we were cousins; and I was eighteen. And above us glowed the blue sky of Italy, and round us the golden sunshine; and there, beside the terrace, lay the beautiful old Roman garden, the fragrant, romantic garden.... If at eighteen one isn’t susceptible and sentimental and impetuous, and prepared to respond with an instant sweet commotion to the smiles of one’s pretty cousins (especially when they’re named Rosalys), I protest one is unworthy of one’s youth. One might as well be thirty-five, and a literary hack in London.